We’ve recently made a temporary addition to our family home. I dreamed that we’d made the same addition elsewhere and was pleased to see it’s absence where it had stood.

As I was fully waking up I looked on at the addition. It was where it had been, not where I had remembered, no dreamed, that it would be.

It was real enough. Had it moved while I was asleep I wouldn’t have questioned it, but there it stood.

I wonder if that’s what it’s like for some people with the love of God. Do they hear the story of Christmas and Easter, or read the story for themselves? Perhaps they too are visited in a dream or by an angel who says “do not be afraid.”

Then they become fully awake and in their wakeful state see that the love of God seems absent. In the twenty-four seven news of tragedy they can’t find it. In the hurried crowd they don’t find it. In the dirty looks of saints and sinners they surely won’t.

How will they know that the love of God is real? Certainly God provides confirmation in believers through the Holy Spirit, but how about our friends on the outside?

It’s going to have to be us. It’s going to have to be us rearranging the world to reflect the truth they only seem to remember is real or possible.

Perhaps like in the birth of a child they will find life where there was none. Perhaps in something truly new they will find a love that had only seemedreal.